For those who could, not or chose not to, come to the "Meet Meg Heap Meting" I hosted for her today, I will remind you that being a good citizen entails three basis concepts in my opinion. They are:
a) Become informed.
b) Participate and think beyond your own prejudices in selecting the most qualified candidate.
c) Contribute to the candidate of your choice so vested interests do not control the voting process.
Meg is imminently qualified and explained to an audience of about 100 people why she is running. The questions were good and she answered them directly and succinctly.
The job of district attorney effects all our lives. Most particularly those directly impacted by crime which is far too prevalent in our community.
I urge you to meet Meg at some other function . If you do, I have every reason to believe you will vote for her.
This is not a Democrat vs Republican issue. This is a matter of competence in one of the most important elected positions in city/county government.
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Pistol Packing Perlutsky zeros in on target Obama and Sowell on the entire Hoax! (See 1 and 1a below.)
John Podhoretz on Obama's strategy not working. (See 1b below.)
Lowry - Holder continues to be a disgrace. (See 1c below.)
I have been haranguing for several years about the double standards, outright bias and lying by this president and some of his highest appointed officials. The articles above simply support the case I have been making. Wake up America!
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The Fed does not want to rock the boat so holds steady for now. In doing so their timing becomes even more important. Historically, Fed timing has not been the best.
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Israel must must improve its defense posture and do so quickly. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Dick
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1) A FEW MORE REASONS TO SEND OBAMA PACKING
By Burt Prelutsky
I sometimes think that Republicans are genetically compelled to bring water pistols to a gun fight. While I acknowledge that it’s difficult to combat the bully pulpit the Left commands, thanks to a corrupt media, I really am sick and tired of hearing Mitch McConnell referring to “Our friends on the other side of the aisle.” Harry Reid is not your friend. Charles Schumer, Patrick Leahy and Dick Durbin, are not your friends. What’s more, Barbara Boxer, Patty Murray and Dianne Feinstein, are not going to the prom with you. Get over it.
What I would like to know is why Democrats get to conduct recall campaigns against Governor Scott Walker and his Republican colleagues in the Wisconsin state legislature, but Republicans never return the favor. When liberal governors and left-wing state legislators push for same-sex marriages, ObamaCare and abortions on demand for 14-year-olds, why aren’t we forcing them to devote their time and money to fighting recall elections?
How is it when liberal members of state senates and assemblies roll over during negotiations with public service unions, driving their states into inevitable bankruptcy, they do so with impunity? I understand they are not motivated by a commitment to the labor movement, but because they want to be able to count on union volunteers and union funds when they inevitably run for re-election. But why don’t we ever disrupt the honeymoon by recalling their sorry carcasses?
I’d also like to know why no Republican in Congress ever accuses Obama of anything worse than incompetence. When it comes to making repairs around the house, I’m incompetent. When it comes to figuring out why my computer does some of the mischievous things it does, I’m incompetent. However, when, at the very same time that China, North Korea and Iran, are all building up their armies and increasing the stockpile of nuclear bombs in the hands of madmen, Obama is gutting the U.S. military and promising to reduce our nuclear arsenal by 80%, that can’t be explained away as mere incompetence. Let’s face it, if a foreign power had the ability to lower our defense capability that easily, they’d leave us no option but to declare war on them.
For all the nonsense about respecting the Office of the President, when the commander-in-chief insists on surrounding himself with the likes of Eric Holder, Van Jones, Kathleen Sibelius, Valerie Jarrett and Jacob Lew, he deserves about as much respect as George Soros or any of those Occupy Wall Street creeps defecating on the sidewalk.
Last year, Obama came up with a budget that was so odious that even his cronies in the Senate voted it down unanimously. Not one to take “No” for an answer, he came back this year with a budget that raised taxes on people in America who make over a million dollars a year, while not asking a plugged nickel from the 47% who don’t pay a dime in income taxes.
He also proposed raising capital gains taxes by 30% and taxing stock dividends at the same rate as regular income. It’s a one-two punch that would destroy the Stock Market. Even Obama’s good friend Warren Buffet wouldn’t invest under those conditions. What’s more, he would probably fire that secretary he’s always yakking about.
Not satisfied with destroying Wall Street, Obama also wants to destroy Main Street by raising taxes on small businesses.
And lest anyone think that they can evade the grasp of the IRS by simply dying, he wants to raise death taxes from 35% to 45%. Under his tax policy, you not only can’t take it with you, you can’t even leave it behind.
What is so confounding about all this is that Obama owes so much to Wall Street, having been the biggest recipient of campaign donations from banks and lending institutions in the history of American politics. And as an Illinois politician, he knows better than most how indebted the Democrats are to dead people for their loyal support down through the years. This is obviously one dog that believes in biting the hands that feed it.
To top things off, we have to listen to Press Secretary Jay Carney telling us, on behalf of Obama, that we didn’t know how bad the economy was when candidate Obama swore to cut the national debt in half by the end of his first term. And yet, if memory serves, in 2008, it was his boss who declared, “I think we all know that we are in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.”
I wasn’t too crazy about Obama’s “Hope and Change” slogan in 2008 and I’m not overly fond of his new one, “Winning the Future.” Still, there’s something to be said for its initials. WTF, indeed!
1a)The Big Hoax
By Thomas Sowell
There have been many frauds of historic proportions -- for example, the financial pyramid scheme for which Charles Ponzi was sent to prison in the 1920s, and for which Franklin D. Roosevelt was praised in the 1930s, when he called it Social Security. In our own times, Bernie Madoff's hoax has made headlines.
But the biggest hoax of the past two generations is still going strong -- namely, the hoax that statistical differences in outcomes for different groups are due to the way other people treat those groups.
The latest example of this hoax is the joint crusade of the Department of Education and the Department of Justice against schools that discipline black males more often than other students. According to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, this disparity in punishment violates the "promise" of "equity."
Just who made this promise remains unclear, and why equity should mean equal outcomes despite differences in behavior is even more unclear. This crusade by Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is only the latest in a long line of fraudulent arguments based on statistics.
If black males get punished more often than Asian American females, does that mean that it is somebody else's fault? That it is impossible that black males are behaving differently from Asian American females? Nobody in his right mind believes that. But that is the unspoken premise, without which the punishment statistics prove nothing about "equity."
What is the purpose or effect of this whole exercise by the Department of Education and the Department of Justice? To help black students or to secure the black vote in an election year by seeming to be coming to the rescue of blacks from white oppression?
Among the many serious problems of ghetto schools is the legal difficulty of getting rid of disruptive hoodlums, a mere handful of whom can be enough to destroy the education of a far larger number of other black students -- and with it destroy their chances for a better life.
Judges have already imposed too many legalistic procedures on schools that are more appropriate for a courtroom. "Due process" rules that are essential for courts can readily become "undue process" in a school setting, when letting clowns and thugs run amok, while legalistic procedures to suspend or expel them drag on. It is a formula for educational and social disaster.
Now Secretary Duncan and Attorney General Holder want to play the race card in an election year, at the expense of the education of black students. Make no mistake about it, the black students who go to school to get an education are the main victims of the classroom disrupters whom Duncan and Holder are trying to protect.
What they are more fundamentally trying to protect are the black votes which are essential for Democrats. For that, blacks must be constantly depicted as under siege from whites, so that Democrats can be seen as their rescuers.
Promoting paranoia translates into votes. It is a very cynical political game, despite all the lofty rhetoric used to disguise it.
Whether the current generation of black students get a decent education is infinitely more important than whether the current generation of Democratic politicians hang on to their jobs.
Too many of the intelligentsia -- both black and white -- jump on the statistical bandwagon, and see statistical differences as proof of maltreatment, not only in schools but in jobs, in mortgage lending and in many other things.
Some act as if their role is to protect the image of blacks by blaming their problems on whites. But the truth is far more important than racial image.
Wherever we want to go, we can only get there from where we are. Not where we think we are, or wish we are, or where we want others to think we are, but where we are in fact right now.
But political spin and pious euphemisms don't tell us where we are. After a while, such rhetorical exercises don't even fool others.
If we don't have the truth, we don't have anything to start with and build on. A big start toward the truth would be getting rid of the kinds of statistical hoaxes being promoted by Secretary of Education Duncan and Attorney General Holder.
1b)Obama’s Poll Troubles Suggest His 2012 Strategy Is Backfiring
By John Podhoretz
The fallout from two major polls yesterday—Washington Post/ABC and New York Times/CBS—finding measurable and significant drops in support for Barack Obama nationwide during the past month has instantly changed the national conversation. Obama is in trouble, and there’s no pretending he isn’t. One poll might have been viewed as an outlier, but two polls taken around the same time with the same sample size of American adults can’t be dismissed as statistical noise. In the New York Post today, in a column written before the release of the NYT/CBS survey, I suggest the media focus on macroeconomic good news is blinding commentators (many of whom wish to be blinded) to facts of American life that can’t be so easily measured. People will not be convinced that they should feel better than they do about their current financial condition and the prospects for the future by assurances about a positive change in the unemployment rate that says nothing about what’s going on with the value of their house and the cost of oil at the pump.
But I want to propose another possibility for Obama’s troubles: His political and tactical strategy for 2012 may be backfiring on him. He has decided, for obvious reasons, to do what he can to highlight the differences between him and the Republicans at every turn, most notably in the recent “contraceptive health” debate. He’s trying to polarize the debate (while making it seem the GOP is doing it), to draw sharp lines of distinction between him and the Republicans; it’s a classic strategy when you can’t run a good-news campaign. And yet this may be the worst possible time for such an effort. Time and again during the past year, Obama has decided to go to the American people with this story to tell: I can’t work with these lunatics. And every time he does—during and after the debt-ceiling debacle in particular—he and his supporters are surprised to find the public assigns him a considerable portion of the blame for the inability to strike deals and move forward.
The president knows the public loathes Washington, and so he has decided to run against Washington. This is usually a Republican strategy and for a good reason—Republican politicians do generally hew to the belief that the federal government is too big and too intrusive and needs to be checked. Barack Obama has presided over the most rapid growth in the size and power of the federal government since the Second World War. He has empowered Washington, and everyone knows it.
He can’t get away with blaming Washington’s ineffectuality and division on the other guys because he is the candidate of Washington. If you want more government—more safety net, more redistribution, more restrictions on the rights of mediating institutions like religious-run charities and hospitals for the purpose of expanding your definition of freedom—Barack Obama is your man. For him to turn around and effectively tell the electorate, “I hate this town like you do, so reelect me because I share your values,” is, to put it mildly, not credible. And there’s this as well: If we’ve spent weeks talking about contraception, which seems to driving everyone bonkers, who’s responsible for that?
1c)Holder's Identity Problem
By Rich Lowry
Wherever he goes, people are required to show identification. When cashing a check. When signing up for a library card. When boarding a plane. When entering certain office buildings. When checking into hotels. When (in the case of the youthful-looking) buying a beer or cigarettes, or entering a bar. The tyranny of the photo ID is so all-encompassing that people can’t enter Holder’s own Justice Department without showing one.
Holder is outraged that in a nation where requests for photo ID are ubiquitous, more and more states are requiring that people show them when they vote. In a speech last year, Holder characterized these voter-ID laws as an assault on the voting rights that Congressman John Lewis — the hero of Edmund Pettus Bridge — fought for in the mid-1960s. Back then, blacks in the South had to fear for their safety if they showed up at the courthouse to try to register to vote. Now, states are merely asking everyone, regardless of race, to show identification that is readily available to all, regardless of race.
That Holder can equate the fight against voter ID to the struggles of the 1960s demonstrates a moral obtuseness insulting to the memory of the civil-rights pioneers. His Justice Department is now blocking a new voter-ID law in Texas, after doing the same to a South Carolina law. It argues that the Texas statute will disproportionally affect poor Latinos and therefore violate the 1965 Voting Rights Act.Why would the yokels in Texas do something so outrageous as ask that people prove who they are at polling places? It is obviously a basic check against fraud. Requiring an ID to vote was one of the proposals in 2005 of the Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by Jimmy Carter and James Baker, neither of whom had previously been noted for his hostility to minorities or the poor.
Analyzing Texas data, the Justice Department contends that anywhere from 6 percent to 10 percent of Hispanic registered voters don’t have ID. It piles up a parade of horribles — no cars, great distances, inconvenient hours — for why such potential voters can’t get to an office to acquire one, even though the state’s Department of Public Safety will issue election-identification certificates for free.
The experience of other states with voter-ID laws suggests that minorities are not the hapless victims that Holder’s Justice Department portrays them to be. Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation points out that black turnout increased in Georgia in 2008, the first election under a voter-ID law, more than it did in Mississippi, which didn’t have such a law. A study by the University of Delaware and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln concluded that “concerns about voter-identification laws affecting turnout are much ado about nothing.”
Before his next speech, Holder should bone up on the Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision in 2008 upholding Indiana’s voter-ID law. The liberal Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the majority opinion. The Court held that “there is no question about the legitimacy or importance of the State’s interest in counting only the votes of eligible voters,” and “we cannot conclude that the statute imposes ‘excessively burdensome requirements’ on any class of voters.” The decision cited the finding of a district judge that plaintiffs had “not introduced evidence of a single, individual Indiana resident who will be unable to vote as a result of the law.” Presumably, if the Indiana law had represented the recrudescence of Jim Crow, the nation’s highest court would have noticed.
Not that any of this matters to Attorney General Holder. Just as the administration is manufacturing a “war on women,” he wants to manufacture a “war on voting rights.” It is the same MO of fevered rhetoric and distortions in the service of the same end of motivating key voting blocs.
Holder’s tenure as the government’s top lawyer is an ongoing disgrace.
Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.
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2)The Next Stage: Active Defense against Precision Missiles
By Moriya Ben-Yosef
The current escalation round in the south came to a conclusion only earlier
today. However, Israel is already looking ahead at the possibility that more
towns will suffer under the threat of rockets from the Gaza Strip in a
future round. “The force buildup must suit itself to deal with precision
missiles," says Uzi Rubin, one of the developers of the Arrow missile and
former head of the Homa Administration at the Ministry of Defense.
According to Rubin, the next phase of the struggle already constitutes a
military threat – precision-guided rockets in numbers that can attack
military facilities and civilian infrastructure. “The threat has thus far
been a terrorist threat – rockets fired nearly indiscriminately; the use of
precision missiles will represent an escalation. The strategic perception
will change. It will interfere with the functionality of the air force, will
interfere with the recruitment of reserves, and threaten infrastructure.
They can paralyze us, and without protecting the home front, a ground
maneuver will not occur. Therefore, active defense of infrastructure and
power stations is essential.
“The current central threat is Syria. Its M-600 missile project with precise
and long-range missiles poses a significant threat. People do not understand
the extent of how dangerous Syria is – the Syrian missile ORBAT possesses
more firepower against Israel than the Iranian ORBAT. Due to Syria’s
location, its light and medium rockets pose a considerable risk. The rebels
are no friends to Israel, and once a regime forms in Syria, whether with a
renewed Assad or an opponent of his, the hostility towards Israel will
remain the same, and might even increase. The fire potential is greatest
from Syria, and the difference is that unlike Hezbollah or Iran, they are
not revealing their arsenal.”
According to Rubin, the test that Syria carried out on December 4, 2011 was
the first time in which images of the missiles that Syria possesses were
ever released.
“The Iron Dome system has tremendous potential. It can probably reach a much
larger range, which could provide greater coverage against most of the heavy
rockets that threaten us today. Recently, a senior defense establishment
official even said that a more advanced version of the system is already
being designed. However, right now attention should be directed to the David’s
Sling project, which is delayed somewhat due to organizational problems.
This missile’s maneuverability is even more incredible than the Iron Dome.
It can handle the threat of cruise missiles and precision-guided rockets,
which will constitute a phase change, with regards to the nature of the
threat, and not merely its scope,” Rubin concludes.
2a Israel Unveils Israeli Made New Bunker Buster
By BARBARA OPAll
Israel last week unveiled an improved precision, bunker-burrowing
weapon, the latest in a series of operational upgrades aimed at honing what
one official here labeled “a very credible military option” against the
Iranian nuclear threat.
Built by state-owned Israel Military Industries (IMI), the 500-pound MPR-500
is an electro-optical or laser-guided projectile that can penetrate
double-reinforced concrete walls or floors without breaking apart. It is
designed as an upgrade to the U.S. Mk82, thousands of which are in Israel
Air Force stocks, and can use Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) kits or
Paveway for guidance.
In an operational test video released March 6, the MPR-500 is seen
penetrating four reinforced concrete walls, with fragmentation from the
explosion limited to a radius of less than three meters.
“The lethality, precision ... and relatively low weight enables its use
against multiple targets in a single pass; an element that increases the
operational effectiveness of attack,” according to IMI.
The MPR-500 bridges an operational gap between the 250-pound U.S. GBU-39
small-diameter bomb — 1,000 of which were approved for sale to Israel — and
the 5,000-pound GBU-28.
In parallel, the Air Force is planning to enlarge its Boeing 707-based
aerial refueling tanker fleet.
Once deployed, the expanded tanker fleet will be capable of providing nearly
2 million pounds of fuel, allowing dozens of Israeli F-15 and F-16 fighters
to carry more weapons for long-range strategic bombing missions.
The Israeli daily Ma’ariv newspaper reported March 8 that Washington had
offered to augment Israel’s aerial refueling and limited bunker-busting
capabilities on condition that Israel refrain from waging an independent
attack on Iran this year. An Israeli security source denied that report,
insisting there was no “quid pro quo” linkage between the timing of future
Israeli operations and additional capabilities that may be forthcoming from
Washington.
A U.S. government source confirmed that additional GBU-28s were a subject of
bilateral talks. However, he insisted that beyond the 100 GBU-28s authorized
for Israel in 2005 and another 50 approved in 2007, there have been no new
notifications to Congress regarding potential sales.
Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, is expected to
discuss options for enhancing Israel’s so-called qualitative military edge
in meetings with U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin
Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, scheduled next week in
Washington.
Very Credible Option
Despite continued disagreement in Israel about the need for near-term
unilateral action against Iran, the security official here insisted that
Israel will have “a very credible option” should Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu order such an attack.
“If we have to act militarily, we will do so well beyond expectations in
Washington and especially in Tehran,” the official here said.
Speaking in Washington March 6, Netanyahu evoked analogies from the
Holocaust when he told a gathering of the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC): “Never again will we not be masters of the fate of our
very survival. Never again. That is why Israel must always have the ability
to defend itself, by itself, against any threat.”
In an interview after respective AIPAC addresses by Netanyahu and U.S.
President Barack Obama, the Israeli security official praised Obama’s firm
determination to act, militarily if necessary, to prevent a nuclear Iran. He
also hailed Obama’s affirmation of Israel’s sovereign right to act in its
self-defense.
But the official cited the differing sense of urgency driving potential
operational timelines in Washington and Tel Aviv.
“The Americans want to wait until they have evidence of Iran’s decision to
assemble a bomb. But we say that’s part of Iran’s strategy. We say Iran will
continue to enrich uranium, harden its facilities and add redundancies that
will allow it to break out or sneak out with nuclear weaponization,” the
official said.
He added, “At that time, for us at least, it will be too late.”
In a March 6 White House press conference, Obama insisted sanctions against
Iran were starting to have an effect.
“And so this notion that somehow we have a choice to make in the next week
or two weeks, or month or two months, is not borne out by the facts,” he
said.
However, Obama also said, “Israel is a sovereign nation that has to make its
own decisions about how best to preserve its security. And as I said over
the last several days, I am deeply mindful of the historical precedents that
weigh on any prime minister of Israel when they think about the potential
threats to Israel and the Jewish homeland.”
In a closed briefing at the Institute for National Security Studies here, a
former senior defense official said both countries would act according to
their essential interests.
“At the end of the day, there is an understanding in both leaderships that
there is a point where you go by yourself,” the former official said.
He also described Israel’s military option as credible, adding, “Just to
remind you that the Israelis surprised the world in the past with
capabilities that nobody [knew] that they could do.”
In 1981, Israel attacked Iraq’s nuclear reactor and in 2007 is widely
believed to have destroyed a suspected nuclear site in Syria.
Retired Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, is
among several leading security experts here disputing Netanyahu’s view that
Iran is a threat to Israel’s existence.
“Terminology is important,” Halutz told participants at last month’s annual
Herzliya Conference. “Iran is a severe threat; not an existential threat ...
and one shouldn’t use this as an excuse to attack Iran.”
According to Halutz, a normally passionate advocate for strategic air power,
“The military option should be last, and it should be led by others.”
He added, “We need to squeeze every last drop out of other ways before
entertaining military options.”
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